So — our household is still reeling over the untimely death of one of our cats, the strange-looking Zeba. She perhaps looked too much like a squirrel for her own good and our Weimaraner dog ate her.

Yes, ate her. Bang. She’s dead. It’s a way bigger story than that but I’ll get to that later.

Some other day.

In the meantime, I'm still dizzy from a conversation I had yesterday with one of my favorite young women from my 12 step meeting that I attend with great regularity near me in West Hollywood.

This woman is filled with compliments for me and my supposed erudition (really nothing compared with Bob and Wlady’s). She says she cannot live without me and my wisdom. She says she leans upon me like a rock.

She made me feel as if I were somebody fairly important. Yesterday she told me that she was feeling sad because her uncle had died — her father’s brother.

He was a school counselor and greatly loved by his community.

"Now, you’re not going to like what I have to say here,” she warned me. "But I just have to get it out. I know it’s sort of a buzzkill after all of the compliments I’ve been telling you. Should I tell you?"

"Be my guest," said I. "Well, he just passed. And he was 85."

"God bless him, I said. "That’s a ripe old age."

"Here’s the bad part," she went on. "You’re 74. So you’re not that much younger than he is or was. So I’ll be 40 when you die if you live to be 85. And I’ll just die without you. And it’s not that far in the future. And I could just count the days on the calendar until I won’t feel like living anymore."

Talk about buzkill!

"Wait a minute! You’re worried about my being so close to death? I admire the sentiment, but how do you think I feel?"

"Yes, but you’re strong. You’re the strong silent type like Gary Wayne, that famous movie star. You’re not afraid of anything."

"It’s Gary Cooper, or else John Wayne," I said.

"Well, you get my point," she replied.

"No, I don’t get the point," I said. "I’m afraid of almost everything. No. Everything. I’m especially afraid of indigestion."

"No, you’re the strong silent type," she insisted.

"Well, what could I say that would correct you? You’re wrong but I’m flattered. Meanwhile let’s go out to get some salted mushroom caps to get over our fear of death."

Still, she had a point. I am old. I feel old. The only times I feel really young are when I’m speaking to an audience, either on TV or in person.

That revives me. But again, she has a point and my wife and I should go over our wills again. I don’t like that though. I don’t like contemplating mortality.

But then I get inspired by my pal, Donald Trump. He’s roughly the same age I am, but he’s a barrel of monkeys of fun and a WWE fighter compared with most people his age.

He’s constantly under attack, but gets even whenever he can, fights back, seems to draw strength from the anger of his critics. Maybe I can learn from him to be strong for a few more years.

I am in a state of endless marvel at Trump. He’s mocked, belittled, tormented, and he just keeps on going like the Eveready battery.

I keep thinking, in line with some suggestions by my super brilliant pal, Judah Friedman, what if by some mischance, Hillary had won in 2016?

What if we then had the lowest unemployment in fifty years? What if she had a Jewish son-in-law? What if she had the lowest black unemployment ever?

What if she had kept the peace? What if she had stood up to the forces of evil and made Jerusalem the undivided capital of Israel?

What if her spouse were the handsomest, most well-dressed first spouse there had ever been?

The media would have her on the cover of every magazine.

The bowing and scraping would be nauseating. But for Trump — as to whom all the big pundit names predicted catastrophe all we get is mockery. Small wonder the public is confused about Trump. They’re told he’s a jack*** and yet great things are happening with him in the White House.

Ben Stein is a writer, an actor, and a lawyer who served as a speechwriter in the Nixon administration as the Watergate scandal unfolded. He began his unlikely road to stardom when director John Hughes as the numbingly dull economics teacher in the urban comedy, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Read more more reports from Ben Stein — Click Here Now.

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